Love playing video games with your Wii U, PlayStation Vita, or Xbox 360? Now you have another choice to refresh your experience on gaming. That’s Project Shield, a totally different high-end handheld gaming console targeted for various levels of gamers.
Project Shield, designed and developed by nVIDIA, the World Leader in Visual Computing Technologies, was officially debuted at the international Consumer Electronics Show 2013 (abbreviated as CES 2013). This is the first time that nVIDIA released a gaming device, declaring its product line expansion and its ambitious vision to compete with the traditional game console producer, like Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. From the appearance, it looks very much like an Xbox Controller, but with an additional flip-up 5-inch touch screen display. You can also call it a clamshell game console.
The question is: Does Project Shield Have the Muscle to Fight? Let’s see its powers in great details.
General Specs: Powered by Tegra 4, nVIDIA’s freshly unboxed quad-core Cortex A15 chip, Project Shield allows perfect balance of power and efficiency, stunning visuals for mobile gaming. Although the amounts of its RAM and on-board storage have not been announced yet, presumably it will accommodates a 2GB RAM and users are offered the choices to expand the storage by importing a microSD slot. As far as ports are concerned, this new game console does not lag behind the mainstream, it harbors a USB port, a standard audio jack, and HDMI output. What’s more, it will support LTE, despite the absence on this beta version, as it only supports WiFi for the time being.
Battery Life: The Project Shield comes out with built-in Li-Ion batteries rated at 38Whr. But, according to the official tone, as all the hard work is done by the PC, playing PC games on this device does not require that much battery juice. nVIDIA also promises between 5 and 10 hours of gaming for the Shield and up to 24 hours of HD video playback.
Controller: The controller on the Shield is officially addressed as “console-grade”. At the first glance, someone might mistake the Shield for a PS3 DualShock 3 controller. The Shield controller includes 2 joysticks, a D-pad, ABXY buttons, left & right bumpers, left & right analog triggers, Start/Back/Home/Volume buttons, and a multi-function NVIDIA/Power button.
Display: The Project Shield incorporates a flipping 5-inch display, with an HD 1280 x 720 resolution. As nVIDIA calls, this display is a retinal display, which boasts a 294ppi pixel density. So, theoretically, it surpasses the direct competitors, such as the PS Vita from Sony and the Wii U from Nintendo. nVIDIA also claims that with the amazing capability of Tegra 4’s Direct Touch technology, the touch response of its so dubbed retinal display is three times better than others, being reluctantly to name the specific devices.
Operating System: maybe this is the most significant feature that nVIDIA brings to a game console: the Project Field carries Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, so that users can access to all the 600,000+ apps in the Play Store, all the Google services, and all the media contents (music, movies, and books) in Google’s store. Another Flagship feature of being a smart game console is that the Project Shield’s full ability to connect to an nVIDIA GTX-powered PC and stream playing PC games, even stream playing them on your HDTV, wirelessly.
Note that DVDFab will soon add support to convert DVD, Blu-ray and other instant videos for this great game console, with the precondition of nVIDIA’s official announcement that the Project Shield supports to play movies.